Where Should CTA’s be in a Podcast Episode?

So if you have just one call to action in your podcast and it is at the end, you might be missing out on some important conversions from your show.

You Need More Than One CTA in Your Podcast

Calls to action are important to have in pretty much any piece of marketing copy that you put out into the world. That’s as true for your podcast as it is for your blog post and your sales pages and anything else. After somebody consumes the content that you’ve created for them, you usually want them to do something after that.

What you want them to do can be very different, and the thing that you ask them to do should be different at the different places in your podcast. There are a lot of areas or a lot of spots within the show that you can put a call to action of a different kind. You can have a pre-roll where you let some people know what’s going on at the beginning of the show. Maybe if you’ve got a time sensitive event – that can be really interesting to put as a pre-roll that plays on all of your episodes.

Then you’ve got your first welcome to your audience, maybe after your intro or after you’ve welcomed the guests and you say – ”Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us here on the show”.
That can be a great time to ask for something small, something easy, like – ”Hey, make sure you don’t miss any episodes because they’re awesome. Subscribe on your favorite platform”.

Then you’ll have the body of the episode. And if you have ads and sponsors there, you can always have a call to actions, ads or promotions for your own things too. But the place people pay most of the attention to the calls to action, at least from a production and from a hosting perspective, is going to be at the end, because that’s the natural place. It’s where it feels the most normal to be having your call to action.

And you’ve got two spots to have a call to action at the end as well. You’ve got what we call the pre-outro call to action, and that’s when you’re saying goodbye to your guest or you’re wrapping up your final thoughts if it’s a solo show. There and then you can ask for something or you can tell people about something or you can direct people to do something. And then you’ve got the very end of the sign off – that’s typically the ”Share and subscribe, leave a rating and review” that you hear very often at the end of episodes.

So something that we do when we are conducting the State of Business Podcasting Report is we look at the content, especially of the beginnings and endings of shows, and that’s how we identify these different common places to have calls to action. And we noticed something really interesting.

The bigger the ask, the more embedded in the content it should be. The very beginning and the very end should be easy. They should be frictionless. It should be subscribe. It should be share. It should be leave a rating and review. Something that people may or may not do. And it’s not a huge deal to you whether or not they do it.

But if you’ve got something big like a new course, a book launch or an event you want people to attend – this is something that you’re going to want to embed more in the content and make more personal. And do it before the very end of the show, when a lot of people have already clicked off or mentally moved on to the next thing that they’re doing anyway.

So make sure that you’ve got calls to action within your show that makes sense in the body of the episode, as well as at the very beginning or at the very end. And you may be thinking now – ”Right, wait a second, I don’t want to repeat myself too much. I don’t want to come off as completely salesy”.

Don’t worry about it. You don’t want to make every other thing you say a call to action, but you can mention 2 or 3 different things over the course of a 40 minute episode without sounding like a broken record. And if you’re so shy that you don’t want to bother people with promoting your own stuff and sharing your own activities and getting people to connect with you in different ways – they’re not going to know you want them to do it. You have to ask for what you want in this regard.

And it is perfectly acceptable in the show that you own and pay for and produce to talk about your own stuff.

Watch: Where Should CTA’s be in a Podcast Episode?

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